Chapter Six #3
“What the hell?” Danny stammered.
Orion delicately extracted the photo from the camera, then reached into his duct tape jacket and pulled out a thick black Sharpie. He uncapped the pen with his teeth and began writing a single word in big block letters across the border.
“ ‘Ex-cal-i-bur,’ ” Danny read.
The photo of Danny began to appear out of the milky darkness, like a message in invisible ink.
“ ‘Excalibur’?” Danny repeated. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No one knows,” Astoria swooned, eyes practically heart-shaped. “Orion is a brilliant artist. Probably the best in the junior class. But you should know he doesn’t talk—rather, he stopped talking…as a protest, I think,” she said, crossing her arms. “Or as an art piece. It’s hard to tell.”
Orion, for his part, simply shrugged.
“But he’s always taking these pictures and writing random words on them,” Christian added. “He’s been doing it for two years.”
“Yeah. It’s straight up Dada,” Astoria said flatly, like that was supposed to clear everything up.
“Wait. What? Why?” Danny asked. “What for?”
“For nothing,” Astoria breathed. “Isn’t that brave?”
Orion blew a soft whisper over the drying ink with purple Cheerio lips, then tucked the photo into his breast pocket.
They began a series of rapid-fire questions.
His old school? All-boys Catholic. His favorite movie?
Probably Lethal Weapon. Was his accent real?
Yes, although Danny was starting to think he needed to go home and watch Masterpiece Theatre to fit in.
Any siblings? None. What about his parents? Danny slumped in his seat.
“Uh, my Ma and a dad,” he muttered. “Pretty normal and boring. What about you guys?”
Christian’s folks were originally from the Philippines, which Danny had vaguely heard of, but now lived in Flushing, Queens, where he and his little sister were babysat by the 7 train and a collection of “titas,” which Danny understood to be aunts.
Everyone in his family always seemed perpetually busy, allowing Christian the freedom to drop into dance classes at a place called Steps after school and on weekends.
Nina’s parents were divorced, her mother a dairy farmer in Vermont and her father vaguely described as “in the biz, in a manner of speaking.” Her mom had left the City and started a new life with a new family and Nina hadn’t seen her in over ten years, but she didn’t seem particularly devastated.
“Besides,” she recounted over a bag of Cheetos, “she left a bangin’ collection of designer blazers. ”
Astoria was adopted, both of her parents lawyers whose favorite pastime seemed to be smothering Astoria with suffocating love, which she resented almost as much as her birth name, which she refused to give.
Orion remained silent.
“So,” Nina said, tucking her cute, chubby chin in her palm. “The most important question: What’s your favorite song in Rent?”
“My favorite…?” Danny tilted his head.
“Rent,” Nina said like he’d misheard, which he hadn’t.
“I don’t…” Danny looked around the table at four pairs of expectant eyes.
“ ‘Seasons of Love’? ‘Take Me or Leave Me’?” Nina said, rolling her hands impatiently.
“ ‘Over the Moon’?” Astoria asked.
“ ‘Today 4 U’?” Christian added, prompting a snort from Astoria.
Danny felt like he was back in his audition, everyone saying the words sheet music over and over, like if they repeated them enough times, he’d somehow understand.
“I…I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about.” Danny slumped in his chair.
“Rent,” Nina said, as if to a particularly slow child. “The musical.”
“I don’t think I know that one?”
“As if,” Nina snorted. “Everyone knows Rent.”
Danny was back at St. Pete’s. Everyone discussing the new Wu-Tang Clan album, or Everclear, or Guns N’ Roses. He briefly considered just playing along—oh right, Rent. But how could he fake a favorite song?
“Oh my God,” Astoria wheezed. “Imagine going to LaGuardia and not knowing Rent.”
“Girls!” Christian cut in. “Be nice to our new friend!”
Christian turned to Danny, spreading his lips, showcasing that chipped centimeter of charm, and Danny was momentarily almost unembarrassed enough to clock that word: friend.
“Rent, you poor unfortunate soul, is simply the most important masterpiece in the history of human civilization,” Christian said. “It’s groundbreaking, it’s perfect, and everyone in this school is justi-fucking-fiably obsessed.”
Everyone started speaking at once.
“It’s about a group of artists in the East Village, who are, like, honestly so cool, but all have AIDS,” Nina said, beaming.
“The guy who wrote it died on opening night,” Christian said. “Not from AIDS, I don’t think, but still so sad and, more importantly, legendary.”
“My dad bought us all tickets for my birthday last month,” Nina said, running her fingers through her shiny hair. “And during the song ‘Halloween,’ Anthony Rapp made eye contact with me. It was awesome.”
“Rent is the only musical that doesn’t suck,” Astoria said. “Even though it basically mainstreams the plight of starving artists, like me.”
“Bitch lives on Seventy-First and Lex,” Christian muttered while eyeing a Sun Chip.
“That’s because my parents make me, Christian, which is a whole other kind of oppression!”
“Seriously, though,” Christian said, smiling gently at Danny, “you should probably get to know it. It’s basically our bible here.”
FLASH.
Orion pulled another picture from the camera and shook it discreetly.
“What are you gonna write?” Danny groaned, cognizant that he was already going along with the unwritten rules of this crazy place, where silent stoners in duct-tape overcoats might take his photo at any moment and scribble it with nonsense.
Orion pulled out his Sharpie again and wrote a single word on the border: “Pumpernickel.”
“Okay, what the hell’s that even s’pposed to mean?” Danny pleaded, knowing full well he’d gotten off easy. Loser was apparently the word everyone was thinking.
“Okay. Fine. Rent. I’ll check it out,” Danny conceded, his stomach beginning to growl. “Now where the hell are the vending machines?”
Nina escorted Danny to the afternoon elective that they apparently shared, Song Performance with Ms. Mellon, who Danny was pleased to discover was the pretty woman from his audition, the one with the honeyed voice who let him sing “a capella” and break the one rule LaGuardia kids were never supposed to break.
On their stroll to the basement, Nina—clearly not having spilled enough at the lunch table—started telling him what sounded like her entire life story, which was fine with Danny, because it meant he didn’t have to talk about himself.
Danny, nodding silently along, learned three more things about Nina: She had been performing since the age of four and had starred in two dozen musicals, including ten at a summer camp called Stagedoor Manor, which was apparently “damagingly expensive, but absolutely worth it”; she was supposed to go to Spence, a preppy all-girls school on the Upper East Side “where girls still learn to curtsy, which is the definition of whatever,” but was rejected because of her father’s business, which was less “in the biz” and more “seven pornographic movie theaters across three boroughs,” a fact that she mentioned as casually as the neighborhood she lived in (the Upper West Side) and what she’d had for breakfast that morning (nothing).
“Five are, like, your normal wank-and-walks that bridge-and-tunnels go to when they’re in town for a dentist convention or whatever,” Nina said, like she was explaining the finer points of her father’s career as an aluminum siding salesman, “and the other two are queer, and they’re actually the nicest ones. ”
Danny’s polite nodding stalled.
“He’s not even gay,” Nina said by way of explanation, as if it were totally possible that a kid’s dad could be gay. “He just saw unmet market demand and was like, bada-bing.”
Danny felt slightly nauseated, either because of the conversation or because of the fossilized Honey Bun churning away in his stomach. But Nina’s mile-a-minute description of her family’s pornography empire had a silver lining: At no point did she ask him about his own family.
Song Performance was held in the same room as his audition, the “black box” with the velvet curtains and the ceiling full of lights.
Instead of desks, a cluster of wooden cubes, each the size of a sidewalk trash can, were arranged in a semicircle, some already occupied by students and backpacks and binders.
There was a piano on the side of the room where the ancient man that Danny recognized from his audition sat hunched over his newspaper—had he moved since last spring?
—filling in the Monday crossword puzzle.
There was only one proper chair at the front of the room, occupied by an angelic figure.
Ms. Mellon sat cross-legged and barefoot, her shoes tossed by her side, one knee poking out of a hole in her blue jeans.
She wore a giant gray sweater with thick brown stitching, and her eyes lit up with recognition as Danny and Nina entered the room.
“Come gather, friends,” she purred, stretching out her arms, which jangled with the clang of a dozen skinny gold bracelets. “It’s so good to see your faces. We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s rock and roll.”
Danny felt the back of his neck tingle like it did when his old dog used to lick his feet, or when his mom used to read him chapters of Charlotte’s Web, curled up next to him on his waterbed.
He took a seat on a cube, which was insanely uncomfortable, but he only noticed in the moments when Ms. Mellon wasn’t talking.
“I know you had Song Performance with Mr. Maylie last year, and a lot of what he taught you is going to carry over,” Ms. Mellon said, reaching behind her head and smoothing her curly hair over her right shoulder.
“The thing I want to focus on most this year is connecting with the lyrics, and thinking of each song you work on as a ‘slice of life.’ ”